Archive for the ‘Other Useful Things’ Category

The term stock photography is used to describe the supply of photographs often from professional photographers) that are licensed for specific uses. Stock photography is used to fulfill the needs of creative assignments instead of hiring a dedicated photographer to do a photoshoot and thus reducing costs and time significantly and still getting the images you need. Stock images can found in many place in the form of online databases, categorized and easily searchable with an easy option for the users to purchase and then directly download them, something that proves to be very convenient. When talking about stock photography we are often referring to royalty-free images, but here the word free has a bit different meaning and it is that you pay just once for the image and not every time you use it. Luckily for us there are also quite some places that do offer free (as in completely free) to use stock photos or licensed under CC license (Creative Commons) that also can be a great help for you for any web project you might be working on.

List of useful places for free stock photos:

1. flickr
This is one of the most popular photo sharing websites online and here quite a lot of the photos are free or CC licensed so you can use them in your projects without problems. No need to register to browse or download them. Flickr also offers royalty-free stock photos so be sure to carefully check the license of the photos you might consider using…

2. stock.xchng
stock.xchng is one of the biggest communities for free stock photos online — there are over 2,500,000 registered users and around 400,000 photos available online that you can browse trough and download. You need to register an account in order to be able to download the photos.

3. deviantART
DeviantART is much similar to Flickr, but the community started around the idea of users to show off their artwork and not just digital photos they made, but becoming popular worldwide you can as well find a lot of free stock photos there, just be careful to reed the usage limitations if there are such on each photo. No need to register to download the photos.

There are some times when you need to register for a free service or website just to check something that is usually not available without registration or to download a single file and after that you just start getting unwanted email messages. So instead of using your main email address in such moments you better go an take advantage of one of the following free services offering you temporary email addresses just for cases like these. Here is a short list of some of the most popular and good such services:

Personally I prefer to use the first three in the list, but sometimes there might be a problem opening a certain mail or a message simply not being received by one of the services, so then you can just go and try the next one… ;)

The new version 2.8 of WordPress called “Baker” has been officially released for download. WordPress 2.8 represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies and overall speed. In the new version there were over 790 bugs fixed from the previous release. Visually WordPress 2.8 feels a lot like the previous 2.7, with just with some minor tweaks here and there…

First and foremost, WordPress 2.8 is way faster to use because of a lot of changes in the way it does style and scripting. There is also an automatic updated for themes much like the core and plugins updates introduced in the previous version. If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor. The widgets interface has been completely redesigned in order to make them even more usable and straightforward even for new WordPress users. Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page in order to utilize all the available space on your high-resolution widescreen display.